Oracle whistleblower suit raises questions over cloud accounting

FWIW, Google does it too: https://www.scribd.com/doc/40513712/Google-v-US-Complaint

And I understand, the cases are not the same at all, but it highlights that Oracle is hardly the only tech company who will take to the courts to help themselves make money.

BTW, I agree with the idea that companies shouldn't only be about making money, but also care about other things, like the welfare of their employees. But companies like that are virtually nonexistent among America's tech giants.

There are plenty of companies that exist to make money and have additional goals.

But, gigantic, publicly traded corporations don't fall into that category, and they exist exclusively to make money. If they tell you otherwise, their PR people are trying to fool you.

I'm also tempted to say a business whose number one goal isn't making money for its owner and employees should probably be registered as a non-profit or a charity or something else, and not a corporation, but I guess there's no reason they couldn't be a corporation.

Good shareholders should look for management exhibiting high levels of integrity. Like Warren Buffet said :

"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy."

At least in the public's eye, Oracle has lost the perception of having any integrity.

This can get ugly - and expensive - real fast because in a large enough corporation it is stupidly easy to miss a detail and this will then be used to put in a claim of a few 100K worth of extra licenses that you need to buy to make the problem go away. It's the mafia, only now with bits and bytes and weird licensing terms that only they know how to interpret.

This is one of the main reasons why everything I do uses open source. The only time these companies still get some money through me is when I buy new hardware and MS levies their tax.

If all Oracle and Microsoft wanted to do was to 'sell some products and services' that would be one thing. But really what they want is to extract as much money from companies that use their products as they can get away with and if they have to use strong-arm tactics on sufficiently locked in customers to get that they'll be more than happy to do so.

The obvious defense - you don't have to do business with them at all - is one that is becoming a more and more viable choice. Twice now I have encountered a company that had transformed their internal applications to be web based using Apple products rather than Microsoft and licensing terms and costs were the main reasons given. I suspect this is going to be a trend of sorts and maybe this will be one backdoor that will allow 'linux on the desktop' to enter companies too (it would allow them to re-use the hardware they already have).

Of course MS has a whole 'TCO' dog-and-pony-show to prove that you'll lose money that way, based on all kinds of funky reasoning which sounds believable to pointy haired bosses.

It would be nice if 'the new Microsoft', Oracle etc. stopped waging war on their customers.

It is possible though to have something called "deferred revenues" in case the customer has pre-paid for those years (i.e., transferred the cash for the 10 years), but those are not revenues (not on the P&L), but a liability to the customer to satisfy the performance obligations (on the balance sheet), and this will be gradually released (apportioned) to actual revenues over the course of the remaining years.